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>if there were an industrial research lab again that doesn’t demand immediate ROI wasn't for example OpenAI exactly that? The difference from the old times her
by trhway 3y ago
>if there were an industrial research lab again that doesn’t demand immediate ROI
wasn't for example OpenAI exactly that? The difference from the old times here seems to be that any advances are easily monetized today due to gigantic VC available, and thus the immediate ROI demand immediately arises from inside - from the employees, from the CEO down to lowest rank-and-file, who see the immediate potential to turn the advance into billions on the spot. Imagine if Alan Key and his colleagues could turn their inventions into billions in the next few months after making those inventions - I doubt they would have let Jobs to take the tour and practically steal the IP.
- linguae 3y agoYou brought up something very interesting that I wish more people emphasized when discussing PARC. Alan Kay and his colleagues were not indifferent to business, far from it. In fact, they actively tried to get Xerox to commercialize their technologies. Many of them got frustrated and either joined other companies (Alan Kay went to Atari before going to Apple, Larry Tesler joined Apple before Alan Kay did, Charles Simonyi went to Microsoft and took Bravo with him, which helped lead to Microsoft Word) or started their own (Adele Goldberg started PARCPlace to commercialize Smalltalk).